Landscape and Urban Planning 101 (2011) 338348

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Landscape and Urban Planning

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/landurbplan

Morpho-spatial extraction of urban nuclei in diffusely urbanized metropolitan areas

Stphane Couturier a, , Mauricio Ricrdez b , Javier Osorno a , Ricardo Lpez-Martnez a
a Laboratorio de Anlisis Geo-Espacial (LAGE), Instituto de Geografa, Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico (UNAM), Circuito Exterior, Ciudad Universitaria, Del. Coyoacn, Apdo Postal 20850, CP 04510 Mexico City, Mexico b Departamento de Geografa Social, Instituto de Geografa, Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico (UNAM), Mexico

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
Remote sensing has permitted estimates of the built-up surface as a regional measure of urban sprawl. However, the accuracy of the estimates and the urban forms associated with this measure are still scarcely documented, especially on the periphery of metropolitan areas where urban land use is scattered in the landscape. An operational framework is presented for the structural description of metropolitan urbanization at regional scale, with a view to enhancing the urban cartography in Mexico. This framework is composed of (1) the extraction of the regional urban sprawl pattern, (2) the accuracy estimate per population density zone, and (3) the automated extraction of urban nuclei within this pattern. The method was applied to the Toluca-Atlacomulco valley, a signicant component of the diffuse urbanization surrounding Mexico City. In the rst step, a Landsat TM image is classied using a decision tree based on prior knowledge and a combination of unsupervised and supervised algorithms. In the second step, the results of the classication strategy are compared with alternative classication strategies. In the third step, compact objects are extracted from the built-up diffuse pattern using operators of mathematical morphology. The distribution of sizes and shapes of the extracted urban nuclei is compared with those appearing in existing ne scale national land use maps, generated via aerial photograph delineation. Among the assets of the method are the relatively objective criteria in the extraction of the urban sprawl pattern, the low cost of its generation, and the description of urban nuclei at a user-dened scale. 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received 30 June 2010 Received in revised form 24 February 2011 Accepted 25 February 2011 Available online 14 April 2011 Keywords: Sprawl Landsat Tasseled Cap Mathematical morphology Accuracy Impervious

1. Introduction Urban growth has reached a magnitude unprecedented in history, a phenomenon driven mainly by the integration of countries and cities into the global economy. In 2005, more than 400 cities exceeded one million inhabitants and, according to the projections of the United Nations Organization, population growth in the next 20 years will occur almost exclusively in urban places, and will concern towns of all sizes (Cohen, 2004). This tendency has already been observed for at least two decades, and includes the conversion of rural to urban spaces on the periphery of cities (Murakami, Zain, Takeuchi, Tsunekawa, & Yokota, 2005). The many implications of urban sprawl can include transformation of the urban structure, the relevance of new social paradigms

Corresponding author at: Laboratorio de Anlisis Geo-Espacial (LAGE), Instituto de Geografa, UNAM, Circuito Exterior, Ciudad Universitaria, Del. Coyoacn, Apdo Postal 20850, CP 04510 Mexico City, Mexico. Tel.: +52 55 5623 0222x45488; fax: +52 55 5616 2145. E-mail addresses: stephcamelo@mailcity.com, andres@igg.unam.mx (S. Couturier), magland3@gmail.com (M. Ricrdez), fjosorno@yahoo.com.mx (J. Osorno), rlm8010@gmail.com (R. Lpez-Martnez). 0169-2046/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.02.039

(such as the spread of informal labour and the perception of insecure landscapes), and new challenges in the relationship between humans and the environment. The classical centerperiphery approach in urbanism has been questioned and is confronted with alternative concepts of ruralurban territories (Cohen, 2004). For instance, in the recent urban history of Mexico peripheral urban growth is a signicant process, especially in the Central Region of the country composed of a consortium of 6 cities, including the Mexico City megalopolis (Aguilar & Ward, 2003). Diffuse or non concentrated, as classically presented urbanization constitutes a challenge for spatial planning and environmental sustainability. Among features aiding the interpretation of diffuse urbanization is the establishment of urban satellite centers, or subcenters, in the metropolitan area of cities. In Mexico, the urban structure and its potential polycentricity have been approached in terms of socio-economic parameters (typically housing and employment densities) derived from census in urban statistical spatial units (Surez & Delgado, 2009). However, the physical urban structure would be a useful complement to these ofcial data because it relates to population density and socio-economic conditions to some extent (Huang, Lu, & Sellers, 2007; Taubenboeck, Roth, & Dech, 2008). This complement would be especially useful in

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the outer periphery of the metropolitan area and for places where the socio-economic parameters remain poorly documented partly because of the importance of the informal economy. Additionally, some morphological aspects of the urban physical structure such as the size and spatial distribution of potential sub-centers are involved in the debate on polycentricity of cities (Adolphson, 2009). 2. Background In Mexico, information on the physical urban structure is recorded in the INEGI (National Institute of Statistical and Geographical Information) medium scale (1:50,000) land use cartography: urban nuclei were visually delineated, within the urban sprawl pattern, on aerial photographs which were acquired between 1996 and 2000 throughout the country. A more precise record of urban use (scale 1:10,000) in the vicinity of cities was produced for the 196888 period by the DETENAL agency (Direccin de Estudios del Territorio Nacional, the former INEGI institution). Unfortunately, none of this cartography reects urban use in the outer periphery of metropolitan zones. On the other hand, none of the more recent national datasets, based on urban geo-statistical areas, contain information on the extent of the physical urban structure. The objective of the present research is twofold: to present a new method for an updated cartography of the physical urban structure, including compact urban nuclei in metropolitan zones and to discuss the criteria, accuracy and perspectives of this method with respect to the previous cartographic methods. The use of satellite imagery has permitted estimations of the built-up surface sometimes also related to the impervious surface in the remote sensing community at the regional scale, for an assessment of land use change and urban growth. Landsat imagery has been tested with some success for the extraction of the built-up surface (e.g. Kaya & Curran, 2006; Prol-Ledesma, UribeAlcntara, & Diaz-Molina, 2002; Yuan, Sawaya, Loeffelholz, & Bauer, 2005). However, the heterogeneous nature of periurban areas has hampered the establishment of a standard automatic processing technique for the classication of satellite imagery; the diversity of sites and environmental settings requires a range of classication strategies. However, several studies have favored a hybrid approach combining unsupervised algorithms (e.g. segmentation techniques), supervised algorithms, and the use of ancillary data (e.g. Clapham, 2003; Khorram, Gregory, Stallings, & Cakir, 2003). Some studies also recommend the use of the Tasseled Cap (see Crist & Kauth, 1986; Huang, Wykie, Yang, Homer, & Zylstra, 2002) transformed Landsat image instead of the original image (Seto et al., 2002) for the supervised step, because of the better discrimination of urban land use by some of the principal components, and for their enhanced biophysical interpretation. Contextual or object-based approaches have also been applied (e.g. Guindon, Zhang, & Dillabaugh, 2004; Jacquin, Misakova, & Gay, 2008), but post-classication manual correction was deemed necessary in periurban areas to ensure the required accuracy after the implementation of these more sophisticated methods. A main concern of this research was to retain low-cost, easily repeatable and interpretable strategies in order to extend the approach to the 56 Metropolitan Zones of the National Urban System (Sistema Urbano Nacional) dened by CONAPO, the National Demographic Council in Mexico (CONAPO, 2007). By contrast with the development of numerous classication strategies, very little information is related to the accuracy of the results in periurban areas; a global accuracy measurement is typically given (e.g. in Mexico: Prol-Ledesma et al., 2002) for the

urban use class over the entire study area. This information is likely to conceal large variations of accuracy in densely urbanized versus sparsely urbanized zones. Indeed, the latter zone should be more prone to classication errors than the former because of the increased mixture of land uses within pixels containing built-up surfaces. An exception to this practice is the study of Jacquin et al. (2008) in a watershed near Toulouse, France, where the accuracy is documented per population density slice in a region of 507 km2 . The detailed measurement of classication accuracy in our study will create a rm foundation for the subsequent urban object extraction in Mexico. Urban object extraction from remote sensing imagery is a vast eld of research. Mathematical morphology has been used mainly at local scale on very high resolution imagery, for road network extraction (e.g. Mohammadzadeh, Tavakoli, & Valadan Zoej, 2006) or for the identication of building structure (e.g. Banzhaf & Hfer, 2008). However, we propose that mathematical morphology could be used at regional scale as well, for the extraction of urban nuclei. A framework is presented for the identication of urban nuclei in the metropolitan zones of the main cities of Mexico. The framework, composed of three techniques, is applied to the TolucaAtlacomulco valley (TAV), a pilot area which contains a signicant component of the diffuse urbanization west of Mexico City (see Fig. 1). First, a technique is developed for the extraction of the urban sprawl pattern based on a Landsat ETM+ image. A classication strategy is built in the form of a decision tree which combines four steps, including the prior selection of regions according to small scale land cover cartography, an unsupervised ISODATA clustering algorithm, and nally a supervised Maximum Likelihood (ML) algorithm applied to the Tasseled Cap transformed Landsat image. The second technique is the accuracy assessment of the classication; the accuracy is measured at two levels of population density and compared with the accuracy of alternative, simpler classication strategies. The third technique is derived from mathematical morphology; compact objects are extracted from the built-up surface pattern, using a compactation operator derived from basic morphology operators. Finally, the distribution and shape of the extracted urban nuclei are compared with the urban land use reected in the INEGI 1:50,000 database. The perspectives and limitations of the method are discussed.

3. Study area and previous information on urban use The study area corresponds to the Toluca-Atlacomulco Valley (TAV), which extends over 4238 km2 , and includes the city of Toluca, administrative capital of the State of Mexico. Toluca is one of the 6 cities, together with Mexico City, which constitute the Central region of the country. Its contiguity to the Valley of Mexico and its environmental characteristics have favored its sustained population and urban growth. In the twenty years from 1980 to 2000, the population doubled in size from about 645,000 to 1,233,000 inhabitants. Among the 364 cities and towns of the National Urban System (CONAPO, 2007), Toluca (61 km west of Mexico City) is classied as rank 3. Its Metropolitan Area is contiguous to the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico (MAVM), and hence pertains to the Megalopolitan category. The area hosts one of the most important industrial zones in the country, as a result of a national plan initiated in the 1960s. Not until the 1990s, however, did the Toluca Valley actually consolidate itself as an industrial valley through the decentralization policy. The wetland environment of the Toluca Valley (1582 km2 ), within the upper watershed of the Lerma river, has served since 1942 as a major reservoir supplying water to Mexico City and the MAVM as a whole. However, the above-mentioned industrialization has caused pollution of the wetland environment and of the

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Fig. 1. Color composite of a 2003 Lansat TM image of parts of the Toluca metropolitan zone including the city of Toluca. The red contours refer to the 1999 INEGI urban use cartography, the most updated available. (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of the article.)

Lerma river, throughout the TAV. The water extraction from the valley and the downturn in agriculture activity associated with sparse urbanization have also affected the environment in the valley. The cartographic information currently available for the urban physical structure in the TAV is composed of

4. Method The method comprises three techniques: the decision tree classication strategy, the accuracy assessment of the classication, and nally the extraction of compact objects, from which the analysis of urban nuclei is derived. 4.1. Preprocessing steps and rationale for the classication approach An ETM+ Landsat image was acquired for the year 2003 (Fig. 1), which covered the entire TAV. The image was geo-referenced, with less than 1 pixel RMS interpolation error, to the 1:50,000 INEGI topographic maps using a set of 55 control points and a polynomial interpolator. Both the original Landsat bands (all except thermal and panchromatic bands) and the three rst components of the Tasseled Cap transformed (TCT) image were used in the classication approach. Prior to the Tasseled Cap transformation, the original image was radiometrically converted to sensor reectance values using the standard irradiance calibration parameters. The rst step of the classication approach consisted in reducing the signal dynamics contained in the image for subsequent classication algorithms. The study area was split into a densely populated zone (DPZ) and a sparsely populated zone (SPZ), according to existing small scale cartography (the 1:250,000 NFI map of year 2000), where DPZ corresponded to the human settlement class of the map and SPZ corresponded to the remaining area. For the large region under study, an unsupervised algorithm (for example the Iterated Self Organizing or ISODATA algorithm) was likely to produce a more objective and repeatable general picture,

1. high scale (1:10,000) DETENAL topographic maps (referred to later as the DETENAL cartography), which contain built-up structures in the vicinity of Toluca (DETENAL, 1982), 2. medium scale (1:50,000) INEGI topographic maps (referred to later as the INEGI cartography), which include contours of settlements, and 3. small scale (1: 250,000) national land cover maps, one of which is the 2000 National Forest Inventory map (or NFI map), where the human settlement class represents urban use.

In the DETENAL and INEGI cartography, urban objects were visually delineated on orthorectied aerial photographs acquired in year 1982 and 1999 respectively over our study area. Unfortunately, the visual delineation was far from exhaustive at regional scale, since urban objects near to the main agglomerations were the focus of the cartographic effort. Additionally, the more recent urban national datasets do not include features associated with the physical urban structure. For example, in year 2003, the geostatistical frame Marco Geo-estadstico Municipal (INEGI, 2005) only refers to administrative statistical units. In this sense, this study is expected to characterize the likely biases in the distribution of sizes and shapes of urban objects as described in the INEGI archive.

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in terms of specic land cover and land uses, than an algorithm supervised by an analyst (Clapham, 2003; Khorram et al., 2003); therefore, as a second step, an ISODATA algorithm was launched, separately over the DPZ area and the SPZ area. 6080 clusters were selected for SPZ and 4060 clusters for DPZ because the latter was expected to be more homogeneous in terms of the spectral response of built-up areas. The third step consisted in the visual labeling of clusters in terms of their membership to the built-up and non built-up classes (Clapham, 2003). The GoogleEarth database was used as the basic reference for the visual labeling of clusters. The ambiguous clusters, containing many pixels in both built-up and non built-up categories, were set aside for a fourth processing step. In many cases, ambiguous clusters contained pixels of manmade features and pixels of fallow agricultural elds, since these land uses are sometimes spectrally similar (Guindon et al., 2004). The fourth step consisted in a Maximum Likelihood (ML) supervised classication of the Tasseled Cap Transformed (TCT) Landsat image. The analyst selected, in training sites extracted from the GoogleEarth database, pixels from either land uses within the ambiguous clusters. The enhanced thematic content of the Tasseled Cap dimensions for the land uses of interest, especially in terms of greenness and wetness, was expected to be useful for the discrimination of the two classes in the case of ambiguous clusters. Based on preliminary tests, we found that splitting the region in two population density zones (step 1) efciently constrained the dynamics of the signal; applying the unsupervised ISODATA algorithm separately on these two zones permitted a signicant reduction of the number of ambiguous clusters. 4.2. Decision tree classication algorithm As a synthesis of the above considerations, a decision tree was built (Fig. 2) to cover the following processing steps: 1. Stratication of the area into a densely populated zone (DPZ) and a sparsely populated zone (SPZ). 2. Application of the ISODATA classier. 3. Visual labeling of pure and ambiguous clusters. 4. Application of a Maximum Likelihood (ML) supervised algorithm to the TCT image for ambiguous clusters. 4.3. Accuracy assessment of the classication The accuracy of the classication was measured at two levels of population density (SPZ and DPZ), and compared with the accuracy of alternative, simpler classication strategies (ML supervised algorithm based on pixels visually selected as training sites, and ISODATA unsupervised algorithm followed by visual labeling of clusters). The GoogleEarth database (mainly Quickbird data from 2005 to 2006 at the time of access of the online database) was the main reference for verication sites; additionally, ground visits were conducted and associated with parallel research for the characterization of urban sprawl. Interview information was collected during ground visits to correct for the case of post2003 urbanization which would induce inconsistent labeling of the GoogleEarth-based reference data. In order to signicantly reduce the cost of ground visits, a two-step sampling design was built to select the verication sites (Couturier et al., 2010), considering both built-up and non built-up categories, and 8 geographic sectors. The entire region (comprising the 8 geographic sectors) was sliced into regular squares, which constituted the primary sampling units (PSUs) for a rst selection. Two hundred verication points were then selected within the previously sampled PSUs, for built-up and non built-up categories in each of the two population density strata (a total of 800 points). These secondary sampling units were located

on the GoogleEarth archive and visually transferred onto the 2003 Landsat imagery using conspicuous features of the landscape, without knowledge of the classication results. The two-step sampling design is fully explained in Couturier et al. (2010). Fig. 3 illustrates the verication points derived from the sampling of the built-up category, in the vicinity of the Toluca agglomeration. Accuracy indices were derived from the inclusion probabilities applied at both steps (primary and secondary unit selection) of the sampling procedure, as described in Cochran (1977). 4.4. Mathematical morphology Compact objects were then extracted from the built-up surface pattern, using a combination of mathematical morphology operators. The 1:50,000 scale INEGI database generally focussed, for urban use, on objects larger than 150 m 150 m (a minimum of 3 mm on the map), although some objects smaller than this size were also delineated in the vicinity of megacities. The Minimum Mapping Unit (MMU) was set to 150 m 150 m for comparison purposes, and served as a guide for mathematical morphology operations. After a visual appraisal of the distribution of errors among small objects, this scale of analysis of compact objects was considered reasonable. A compactation operator C was designed as a sequence of convolutions of the basic mathematical morphology operators erosion E and dilation D (Fig. 4AC and EG). First, the operators Opening On and Closing Cn are derived as follows (illustrated in Fig. 4D and H): On = E n Dn Cn = Dn E n (1) (2)

where is the convolution sign and the exponent n indicates the number of iterations of the basic operators. The compactation operator is nally derived as follows (illustrated in Fig. 4I): C = On Cn (3)

In this application, n was set to three (n = 3) and the kernel associated with the basic operators was a 3 3-pixel cross-shaped kernel. In terms of compactness, the procedure with n = 3 ensured that urban objects smaller than 150 m 150 m were removed from the urban pattern, while non built-up surfaces smaller than 150 m 150 m within urban objects were transformed into urban use. 5. Results 5.1. Classication of the urban sprawl pattern The urban sprawl pattern in the TAV derived from the decision tree classication of the Landsat image (Fig. 5), was spatially more comprehensive than the INEGI cartography, in the rst place because of urban growth between 1999 and 2003, but also possibly because of the non-exhaustive character of the photograph delineation that served as a basis for identifying main urban areas. Some features of the oldest parts of Toluca City as described in the detailed DETENAL 1982 cartography (Fig. 6a), especially urban parks, can be recognized on the built-up pattern (Fig. 6b). Fig. 5 also shows the distribution of verication points assessing the accuracy of the classicationtwo-class (built-up and non built-up surface) assessment stratied by geographic sector and by population density zone. The overall accuracy of all three methods (Table 1) is high, reecting mostly the good performance of the Landsat classication in terms of spectrally discriminating non built-up surfaces in sparsely populated zones (SPZ, the most extended surface of the classied image). However, a major challenge of the classication (and main goal of this research) was

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Fig. 2. Flow chart of the decision tree classication algorithm. SPZ and DPZ are respectively sparsely populated zone and densely populated zone.

Table 1 Percentage accuracy of the classication results for the built-up and non built-up categories in the Toluca Atlacomulco Valley (TAV), for each population density zone. SPZ = sparsely populated zone; DPZ = densely populated zone. Accuracy gures in parenthesis refer to the assessment of a map with post-classication visual cleaning. The condence interval at 95% probability was estimated for each index and did not exceed 0.5%. Classication strategy Characteristics: Maximum Likelihood Supervised classication ISODATA Unsupervised classication with visual labeling of clusters: 92.2% 93.2% 94.8% 33.2% (57.7%) 59.0% Decision tree Classication combining unsupervised and supervised algorithms 93.0% 92.4% 96.3% 56.3% (70.1%) 63.4%

Overall accuracy, total TAV area Built-up area in the densely populated zone (DPZ) Non built-up area in the sparsely populated zone (SPZ) Built-up area in the SPZ Non-built-up area in the DPZ

89.4% 84.0% 91.2% 24.8% (46.8%) 65.0%

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Fig. 3. Verication points in the vicinity of the Toluca agglomeration (San Mateo urban settlement). The transparent layer over the GoogleEarth online imagery represents the built-up surface derived from the decision tree classication.

Fig. 4. Processing chain of the compactation morphological operator. Compactation is derived from a convolution of Opening and Closing. In this illustration, Opening and Closing are based on Erosion and Dilation using a 3 3-pixel cross shaped kernel; (A and E) urban settlement in the TAV region (black); (B) deleted pixels by erosion in grey; (C) eroded pattern (black); (D) opened pattern (black) obtained after dilation of C; (F) added pixels by dilation in grey; (G) dilated pattern (black); (H) closed pattern (black) obtained after erosion of G; (I) compacted urban settlement, obtained by a Closing of the D pattern.

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Fig. 5. Regional urban sprawl pattern in the Toluca Atlacomulco Valley (2003), and distribution of the verication sites using a two-step sampling strategy, stratied by geographical sector and by population density zone.

Fig. 6. Built-up surface of Toluca city (central area) in the 1982 DETENAL cartography (a) and derived from the decision tree classication of the 2003 Landsat image (b). In 1982, the main central circuit (in red) is the Paseo Tollocn avenue. In 2003, the built-up surface (black) has covered the entire area except the North-western mountainous zone. (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of the article.)

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Fig. 7. Distribution of urban compact objects derived by the morpho-spatial method in the periphery of the Toluca Metropolitan Area (2003). Sizes are differentiated by color tones. INEGI urban use cartography (1999) appears as blue contours. (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of the article.)

Fig. 8. INEGI 1999 ortho-photograph (left) and Quickbird 2005 imagery (right) close ups in the eastern periphery of Toluca City. The Quickbird imagery is extracted from the GoogleEarth online database with an overlay of additional material. The semi-transparent layer with dark contours represents the built-up surface derived by the morpho-spatial method. The brighter (red color) contour indicates INEGI urban use cartography, based on the visual interpretation of the 1999 ortho-photograph.

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Fig. 9. Area, perimeter and shape index distributions of urban objects in the Toluca-Atlacomulco Valley (TAV), derived from: (A) the morpho-spatial method and (B) the INEGI urban use cartography. The uneven intervals on the X axis correspond to the natural breaks of the overall data distribution. The shape index measures the variance from circularity.

the identication of the built-up surface in the SPZ. An accuracy gure is indicated in parenthesis for each classier, which refers to accuracy results after visual cleaning was applied; this visual cleaning consisted in masking from the classication process vast rural areas where no urbanization was visible on the verication material. The results suggest that the method based on a decision tree, detailed in the method section, improved classication accuracy (56.3% or 70.1%) with respect to concurrent methods in the SPZ (24.833.2% or 46.857.7%). For comparison, 25% accuracy

was reported by Jacquin et al. (2008) for the built-up surface in spread urbanization zones in their object-oriented classication (65% after manual cleaning). Their built-up area was obtained with 93% accuracy in the dense urbanization zone, and in the present study the built-up area was obtained with 92.4% accuracy in the DPZ zone. The results of these two studies suggest that the use of both automatic algorithms and visual controls within the classication strategy achieves an acceptable classication accuracy for built-up surfaces in sparsely populated zones.

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5.2. Urban compact object extraction The distribution of compact objects derived from the compactation operator for the Toluca Metropolitan Area (Fig. 7) is similar to the distribution shown in the INEGI cartography, for the larger objects (>73.5 ha). Two cases of discrepancy were attributed to classication errors of the morpho-spatial method. Indeed, some sparsely vegetated areas as well as sandy and rocky terrain including quarry sites tended to be confounded with built-up surfaces and remained difcult to classify with our method. More discrepancies occur for objects in the 20.373.5 ha category; a visual analysis of the 1999 ortho-photographs reveals heterogeneous delineation criteria for the INEGI photo-interpretation, apparently leaving out some urban settlements even though their physical structure is more compact than that of some other settlements that it did include. One of these cases is illustrated in the eastern periphery of Toluca (Fig. 8). In fact, criteria other than the density of built-up surface inuenced the INEGI photo-interpretation and its selection of urban forms within the urban use cartography, such as the administrative importance of the settlement, connectivity to neighboring centers, etc. Nevertheless, the morpho-spatial method presented here could provide a more objective way to delineate potential urban nuclei within the inter-twined, diffuse urban thread of the Metropolitan Area. For comparison purposes, a statistical exploration of the data was performed through the calculation of simple parameters such as area, perimeter and shape (Fig. 9). The shape index represented the dissimilarity of the object with respect to a circle and was com puted as follows: IS = p/2 a, where p is the perimeter and a is the area of the object. A considerably higher number of objects was detected by the morpho-spatial method than with the INEGI cartography. This result reected an overall overestimation of objects by the morpho-spatial method in rocky, sparsely vegetated areas, an underestimation of objects in the INEGI cartography (bias towards objects in the vicinity of the main agglomerations), and the grouping of small objects into bigger ones in the INEGI cartography (see Fig. 7). The INEGI cartography includes some very small objects (<2 ha), below the minimum mapping unit assigned to the morpho-spatial method for this study. However, visual inspection of the 1999 ortho-photographs reveals that a majority of the objects of this category were not mapped in the INEGI cartography either, and this indicates a bias against the representation of very small urban objects. Likewise, objects between 2 and 43 ha, according to a visual inspection of the ortho-photographs, were underrepresented in the INEGI cartography; this may have been one reason why they were fewer than those recorded by the morpho-spatial method. By contrast, INEGI cartography reports more objects than the morpho-spatially derived cartography in the high-area categories (43519 ha, excluding the agglomeration of Toluca City). The visual delineation of large objects on the ortho-photographs may have tended to include relatively large non built-up areas within the objects, while the morpho-spatial method might have left these areas out of the object (see Fig. 8). Altogether, the morpho-spatial method detects objects with an area distribution approaching a decreasing exponential curve, a tendency that might be closer to reality than the atter area distribution produced by the INEGI method. One of the reasons for this under-representation of objects may be cost optimization in visual photo-interpretation. Likewise, the perimeter distribution, in the case of the morphospatial method, is a sharp decreasing function for the smaller objects (as far as the 37.3 km perimeter), whereas the distribution is a atter function in the INEGI cartography. In contrast to area, the perimeter of larger objects tends to be larger in the morpho-spatial

cartography than in the INEGI cartography, probably because of the contribution of the perimeter of non built-up areas within urban objects in the morpho-spatial cartography, compared with more compact objects in the INEGI cartography. The shapes of INEGI urban objects tended to be more complex than those derived by the morpho-spatial method. The latter tended to be closer to circular, probably because of the simplication of shapes incurred by mathematical morphology transformations. INEGI urban objects may therefore contain more information, more details, than the objects derived from the morpho-spatial method. This uniform simplication of shapes (elimination of details), according to a given mapping scale, however, may reect more consistency in urban object shapes throughout the region than the one given by INEGI cartography. Indeed, visual delineation at a consistent scale throughout a vast area is difcult. 6. Conclusion This research proposes an operational algorithm for (1) the classication of an urban sprawl pattern at regional scale and (2) the extraction of compact objects from this pattern in order to study potential urban nuclei in extended metropolitan zones. The attractive characteristics of the method include (1) its operational use (limited input and low cost, incurred within a reasonable processing time), (2) the accuracy of information on the urban sprawl pattern at two levels of population density, according to a probability sampling scheme, and (3) its ability to generate an alternative urban use cartography at the national level. The method was applied to the Toluca-Atlacomulco Valley (TAV) with promising levels of accuracy, with respect to past studies, such as 92.4% accuracy for the built-up category in the densely populated zone, and 56.3% (and 70.1% after visual cleaning) accuracy in the sparsely populated zonethe most challenging for mapping urban use. The advantages of the morpho-spatial method over the existing production techniques of urban use cartography in Mexico included a more exhaustive coverage of urban objects at regional scale, a more realistic distribution of the objects in terms of sizes and perimeters, and the availability of more objective and exible criteria such as user-dened minimum size for the physical characterization of urban nuclei. Classication errors did affect the accuracy of the product, especially in sparsely vegetated, rocky terrains of the altiplano and quarry sites, for which more research should be undertaken. Possible improvements include the prior topographic correction of the image (although early explorations showed over-correction effects), and a fusion strategy with Radar data. The method is about to be extended to the National Urban System in Mexico. Change detection algorithms are under development with SPOT data, the best available national coverage at regional scale, in order to update the cartography. Some of the perspectives of this work are new horizons for dening and characterizing urban structure. Future research could explore relationships of the urban sprawl/urban nuclei patterns with socio-economic statistical information, the traditional input for characterizing urban structure. Acknowledgments This research has been conducted under PAPIIT project numbers IN113609 and IN307410, funded by DGAPA-UNAM. Thanks are due to the INEGI institution for providing the DETENAL and 1:50,000 scale cartography. We also would like to thank the CentroGeo Institute where some of the late stage of this research has been conducted, and the LAGE colleagues in charge of the precise geo-referencing of the Landsat imagery to the INEGI maps.

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